


human temperature

by QuestiontheCorpus



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Childhood, F/M, Pre-Canon, Puberty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 20:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2745542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuestiontheCorpus/pseuds/QuestiontheCorpus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is the child with golden hair, destined for nothing but runes smeared in blood across her forehead. [An imagining of Marie's youth. Some Stein/Marie.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	human temperature

Where she comes from – not quite ice, not quite snow – things are pretty, in the conventional sort of way. Had her family not retreated to their city-by-sea, she would have been fortieth to the throne, or something similar, in the tribal wastelands to the north.

Marie's parents still speak in tongues born beneath isolated stalactites, when they think she's gone to bed, but she's really sitting at the very top of their suburban staircase while their voices thrum through the tall, thin walls, each word one that drapes around her like finery.

Her childhood is remarkable in the very fact it isn't: she is the first of her people, so she's told, to be raised away from their primitive realm. She goes to school and learns the alphabet, and her parents don't keep many friends in the area but oh, she's doing very well in her studies. They think she's a prodigy – for what, she isn't sure. But for something.

* * *

Her soul peeks out of her chest at nine years old, invisible to her eyes but present in her reflection. She's in the midst of brushing her teeth, but the glide of bristle over molar comes to an abrupt stop when she falls entranced, staring into the bathroom mirror.

It feels natural. It feels like nothing.

It's a secret locked inside her that she doesn't tell her parents; she sees no reason to. She begins to favour going to bed early –  _for school_ , she says – to poke and prod at her skin, to wonder if she could pull it apart like wet clumps of tissue paper and see the fat, gold thing nestled behind her ribcage.

That would hurt, so she doesn't. She's rewarded for spending so much time on dental hygiene.

* * *

_Eleven_  crashes upon her as adulthood would: the tribe she hardly recalls would now deem her eligible for marriage. The red stains upon her sheets frighten her far more than the glimpses she gets of what's in her chest, but her mama tells her it's perfectly normal. Girls just bleed that way.

Marie isn't to tell the boys at school, because they wouldn't understand; they are children. She, budding woman that she is, would only be laughed at, a target for cruel words.

So she doesn't. Though mama doesn't elaborate, she can guess what is meant by  _not_   _understanding_  – they have never seen their souls, never woken to red all over their sheets. Never panicked that it's their soul escaping in a slither down their thighs.

* * *

Scandinavia is cold, but it's colder in winter. Warm breath sticks like tar in her throat, and it becomes a struggle to run on legs that can't quite carry her when the ice in the air refuses to let her breathe.

Those boys have taken to chasing her, lately – everyone thinks there's something strange about a  _princess_. Or a rumoured one, at least, for the local gossips are certain Marie's family are from the wastelands, northlands, a world that should stay far away.

 _Better than us_ , the boys shout, at the fortieth-to-the-throne;  _do you think you're better than us?_

Their houses are larger and their parents own two cars, but there is no reasoning with children who've never heard of exile. She runs home every day until the day she can't run any more, this cold Scandinavia tripping her up to scrape her knees bloody before she's crying on the asphalt.

She hardly makes it through the schoolyard grounds – and those boys perform the caricature of the prince they think she intends to marry. The whole town knows about her, but doesn't speak: their children do, and their children are the ones who hurt her.

They throw rocks and brandish sticks and she is thirteen when she loses her eye.

* * *

With a half-blackened morning breaking outside just on time, a clinical hospital bed is what makes her tired. Too tired to prod and poke at the gold silk that squirms beneath her skin: something she hasn't seen for months, years.

Half the world eludes her.

There's still a half dipped in justice she wills herself to see.

* * *

_Political exile,_ the masked man murmurs. As he does, Marie sits upon the provided chair (authority) and nervously kicks her legs (dissent).

_Of the Mjölnir sect. Norse worshippers under a system of monarchy, northern and known for human sacrifi—_

_That will suffice._ There is another man here, but she can't see him: he called himself a teacher when he fetched her from the airport, and she'd never thought herself capable of English when she'd first stepped upon American soil.

But that was an hour ago.

 _Your father was ver_ y  _brave_ , the first man asserts, clapping floppy white hands together as his porcelain face vibrates with the effort of speaking. Strange, strange – he dresses strangely, but she isn't scared by a skull.  _Your father was brave enough to take you and your mother to the south with him._

_She is still a Mjölnir._

_Thirtieth to the throne._

* * *

Thor reigned eternal over thunder, and storms, and lightning, and the oak trees destroyed by all three. He walked on the frozen plains her people did, centuries before, until this man with a mask made him stop: Thor's eternity ended and his people disappeared into their tundra.

They were not gone. Their noble cause came in striking down the non-believers, those who had allowed Thor to be taken from them, spiriting away their children's souls when they stood in pitiful defiance.

Marie clutches her chest; that would  _hurt_.

* * *

It's the cruellest irony that, after everything her parents did to remove her from that place, her soul takes the shape of a Hammer – and by the time the Academy finishes enrolling her, she is the twentieth to the throne.

They train her. Not everyone can do what she does, because not everyone is so acutely aware of the wavelength wrapped around their bones like a ribbon.

Her meister is a quiet girl from somewhere else across the sea, a country of umber skin and hot winters. One day they will go back there together. Never once does she hear her meister's story.

* * *

This Academy is for people just like her: the corridors are sanctuaries for the strange and the sullen, indignant and... insane. For a few weeks, scandalous rumours circulate about a red-haired boy,  _older_ , and an argument with his meister – scalpels are involved, somehow, and Marie only learns through a letter from her father that she would be tenth to the throne, now.

She blossoms into fourteen years.

* * *

It's the masked man's doing that her people are dropping like flies – he has them destroyed, insides drawn from them in ropes of muscle and organs strewn in military patterns soon buried by snow. He is her Headmaster and he thinks Marie is promising.

* * *

Murderous strangers so  _rarely_ appeal, bar one. Bar one, only one; one that's  _lovely_.

He's close to graduation when she wanders too far into the Academy's grounds, trees and plants for miles and miles – her eye has long adjusted to distance.  _He_  is the boy behind the previous year's scandal: cutting people open and stitching them back together.

Well. That's fair of him, isn't it?

This boy's hair is grey though he isn't very old – older than her, nonetheless. He hardly reacts when she steps out from the treeline and stands there, watching from the edge of his little clearing, because he's busy doing the most  _revolting_  things to a frog. It baffles her that they keep letting this boy near sharp objects.

They make no idle chatter. He lets her observe and she lets him be, standing patiently on guard duty for him. The teachers are all interfering busybodies, he solemnly explains, and he is a _scientist.._. so she believes him, though she, Weapon, can see nobody's soul, at her age; not even her own.

 _He_  can. He stands up to regard her once he is done, looking her up and down slowly with analytical eyes: he focuses on her chest, and his smile is not lecherous. She knows, then, that he sees it – and if he's smiling it must be because he likes it.

She wouldn't really mind if he kept looking. He could look for hours and she'd be happy; a secret shared tastes better on the tongue.

* * *

What she  _can_  see is defined by what she can't.

Here is the child with golden hair, destined for nothing but runes smeared in blood across her brow, and this is the way she moves from one side dark to one side light.

* * *

The boy who liked to look at her graduates just as she was beginning to consider scrawling  _Mrs Marie Stein_  on her schoolbooks, all the while designing an appropriate wardrobe for any prospective husband of hers – because that's what she decides she wants.

A house, but not by the sea, and a husband as brave as her father and as gentle as the Academy. Arms, enveloping, as these corridors do.

* * *

Marie's people are nearly gone, the Headmaster tells her. They meet in private to discuss it like he expects her to be upset.

She takes her first soul by the end of the year, and they come so easily after that.

* * *

Azusa has taken Marie under her wing: they're both hurtling towards a world in which they're Death Scythes,  _unstoppable_ , but Azusa is adamant that shouldn't go to their heads. The red-haired boy becomes one quietly, without much fanfare, now he's left the Academy and found a new meister.

It's cute. They marry soon after.

 _Plenty_  of fanfare accompanies him when he returns to the Academy for motivating new students, because, it turns out, he's a big hit with the girls. Azusa doesn't have much time for boys – Azusa has time for very little – so Marie makes sure not to mention them much.

* * *

This is the world turning upside down. Marie's meister suddenly has the drive to kill a witch after her first love leaves her.

* * *

This is the world turning right side up. The cold finds Marie's parents soon after, and the snow comes to bury them along with all the others.

* * *

When Azusa departs, Marie is left to her studies and training. No longer does she scratch at her chest, but she still detests the cold – so it's fitting, then, that she is called back to the Headmaster once more in December, the last time in her youth she's going to see him.

Her people are gone. The world is free from the threat of worshippers to a demon who claimed to be a God, but this won't be the last. This is textbook.

They ask Marie if she's okay.

It doesn't come easily, but she doesn't really have to dwell on what her response will be, either. She smiles to think the throne is hers, now – her kingdom of one is bittersweet, but that's all right.

_On I'll go._

_On I'll go to warmer futures._


End file.
